How Gen AI Gives Plaintiffs Lawyers an Edge in Mass Torts
Multidistrict litigation involves large, sweeping, high-stakes cases — and ediscovery is often where the battle is decided. Whether handling class actions over medical injuries or defective products, plaintiffs’ attorneys come up against enormous volumes of electronically stored information. Success requires innovative approaches.
That’s where Elizabeth Koenig comes in. As Senior Vice President of Consulting at ILS, Koenig works exclusively with plaintiffs’ firms, helping her clients level the playing field against often much better resourced opposing parties. Her work involves introducing firms to new technologies designed for the document review and trial prep complexities inherent to MDLs.
Koenig says GenAI is different from novel tools of the past, and she’s seeing more leaders and attorneys getting excited about trying them out. “These tools are so accessible. They allow lawyers to be creative with the documents and dive into the evidence in a totally new way,” she said. “It’s really transformative for discovery.”
Koenig, a lawyer and certified ediscovery specialist, sat down with Everlaw to discuss AI’s impact in real-world litigation and how she sees it transforming her work.
Lawyers from all walks of life deal with the challenges that come from ballooning volumes of electronic data. How does that play out for plaintiffs’ firms, particularly in the context of mass tort litigation?
For plaintiffs firms, everything about this work is outsized. An MDL typically entails thousands of individual clients across multiple jurisdictions with dozens of firms coordinating review. The attorneys often need to sort through millions of electronic documents from various defendants and in varying formats. If the matter has a global flavor, the documents will be in different languages.
It’s important for plaintiffs’ attorneys to adopt new technologies to avoid being buried in document dumps, missing facts that are relevant to the case, or wasting time and money on duplicative review work.
What are some of the strategies you’re seeing leading plaintiffs’ firms using to address these challenges?
Generative AI technologies are key — they’re a real leveling factor. The complexity of MDL work makes keeping up with the latest innovations essential. Tools like predictive coding cut down review time by identifying likely relevant documents early on, but generative AI-powered search strategies have taken that to the next level by helping case teams evaluate their data as a whole and quickly surface key facts predictive coding might not have identified.
"The Project Query tool is the quickest way for lawyers to use generative AI in their practice."
And tools like Project Query, which one of our clients has been a part of in beta, stands heads and shoulders above other tools in doing the heavy lifting for attorneys. [Edit. note: Project Query is the latest EverlawAI Assistant tool designed with GenAI for asking questions in plain language across terabytes of data] It’s just natural language — you can ask questions and have an answer in seconds rather than sending teams of associates to go and look for the information, hunting and pecking through every document. It is just incredible.
Our annual Ediscovery Innovation Report showed lawyers adopting GenAI three times faster than other transformative technologies and the uptake is continuing, per our latest findings, but some hesitation around GenAI continues. How’s the response on the plaintiffs side?
We’ve seen a real swell in interest, especially in the last six months. Increasingly, new and existing clients are asking about GenAI. They want to know how we’re using it. They understand this technology is becoming widely adopted, and many of them are using it in their personal lives so they are eager to see this in their discovery work.
"It’s more than just a search tool. Lawyers can get a very fast overview of the case without having to read every single document."
It has been great to be able to work in the beta for Project Query because it's allowing us to see what’s coming and to be thinking about it so we can help develop new workflows for our clients.
Tell us more about your client’s experience with Project Query.
We have a plaintiffs’ firm that is in active depositions in a very large mass tort. I can’t share the details of the case, but like many MDLs, it involves millions of documents. What our client was really impressed with was how easy it was for their teams to jump in and seek insights through Project Query using plain language. It allows any member of the trial team to ask questions almost like an imaginary third-party who knows everything about the case and that provides answers with citations to the documents where they can verify the information.
They find it’s more than just a search tool. It doesn’t just let you find all the reports that include certain statistics. They can get a very fast overview of the case to get to the bones of a story or a topic without having to read every single document. That kind of leap in efficiency helps reduce costs.
“These tools are so accessible. They allow lawyers to dive into the evidence in a totally new way."
Given that lawyers and legal professionals tend to work in silos — how can these types of tools break down barriers among teams?
The Project Query tool is the quickest way for lawyers to use generative AI in their practice. Unlike other AI tools, it doesn’t involve a lot of extra administrative or training time — it’s easy to use out of the box.
That accessibility even allows higher ups, partners and members of leadership committees, who usually rely on others to find information for them, to want to see how they can ask the AI questions themselves. It’s easy to learn to pose better questions to get the best response. Our client opened up the tool to a large group in the last month and a half. They’ve had two dozen users asking about 650 questions so far, and it continues to be used on a daily basis.
Given how easy and quick it is to train people on the tool and the amount of insight it provides in mere moments, Project Query really seems to be a game changer for lawyers in a rapidly evolving legal environment. It’s exciting to see how it’s playing out in a case that is in active depositions. We think that the team’s quick adoption is indicative of what will be a high degree of interest once it’s released to the general public. We appreciate the opportunity to work with Everlaw in the tool and to help shape its future.
